Reference no: EM133312210

Assignment:

For thousands of years indigenous tribes cut and burned small patches of tropical rainforest to plant crops. After several years a patch would be abandoned and another small patch of rainforest would be cut and burned. This pattern of forest use was sustainable at low intensities of disturbance. Over the past century extensive areas of tropical rainforest have been cut and burned for commercial farming and cattle grazing. These farms and ranches are often later abandoned since productivity on these farms decreases after several years, but the tropical rainforest communities seldom recover. In many areas, tropical rainforests have been reduced to small, isolated patches of rainforest.

a. Provide an explanation for high tropical rainforest community diversity based on niche theory of community ecology.

b. Provide an explanation for high tropical rainforest community diversity based on ecosystem energetics.

c. Use our understanding of nutrient cycling in ecosystems to explain why tropical forests often do not recover following deforestation, but temperate forests of North America often have recovered.

d. Use the concept of succession to explain why small-scale disturbance of tropical rainforests by indigenous tribes may INCREASE total diversity of rainforest species.